Forbes Week #1: Looking Failure in the Face

Statue of Dante, Florence, Italy

       Anyone who writes a book wants it to echo. And while my books are certainly not reverberating around the world and over the decades, they do vibrate quietly at certain times in certain places. A dozen years after it was published, "Complete and Utter Failure" stuck in the mind of an editor at Forbes, enough that he would ask me to write something on the topic, which was enjoying one of its periodic revivals in interest. I think that the opening sentence was inspired by the novelty of writing for a business magazine—this was posted  in the online edition March 2, 2007, and later ran in the print magazine itself, which pleased me greatly, since in that far off era it meant they paid me a second time.
  
    Dante Alighieri had a very bad fiscal 1302. His mission to Pope Boniface VIII ended in a betrayal, political rivals burned down his home in Florence and he was forced to flee into exile and condemned to die if he returned, accused of the rather ordinary and unpoetic crime of skimming money off municipal road repairs in his capacity as superintendent of widening and straightening roads, one of the many mundane duties the poet performed for his beloved native city.
     But Dante made the best of it. While scrounging his living, he began writing Inferno, the first part of his Divine Comedy, inventing a fiery Hell and meticulously placing his enemies--including Boniface--one by one into it. The public embraced his creation. Dante was celebrated, both in his lifetime and without pause for the next 700 years, lauded as one of most important writers of the modern world, a titan alongside Shakespeare and Cervantes.
     All in all, a fair recovery.
     We all fall down in our lives at one point or another. Some stay down; others get back up. Failure is such a common human experience that it is difficult to find a general observation about it that doesn't sound trite, like something off a high-school locker room wall. "Winners never quit, and quitters never win." "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." And on and on.
     Despite all the truisms about failure, and despite it being universal, we still tend to ignore failure. We leave the disappointments off our resumes, and we overlook them in the lives of others.
     How many people, watching Steve Jobs announce the iPhone, the latest hot product from computer giant Apple , paused to remember that he was once a notorious has-been? That in 1985 Jobs was forced out of the company he co-founded before blowing $100 million on NeXT, a start-up computer company that arrived stillborn?
     Not many. Because success eclipses failure. We think of George Lucas as the creator of Star Wars, not the guy who produced Howard the Duck. When we see Dustin Hoffman chatting with David Letterman, he is the star of The Graduate and Tootsie, not the star of Ishtar, one of the biggest bombs ever made.

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Sailing the ocean blue was only a start: Columbus Day more complex than it looks

Portrait of a Man, Said to be Christopher Columbus, 

by Sebastiano del Piombo (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

   Columbus Day, again, and time for the ritual re-staging of the Italians v. Indians skirmish, two marginalized groups fighting over a shred of dignity. I wish the Italians could gracefully give in and find somebody else to honor—hint: Fermi—but they are as yet  incapable of that. Time will do the dirty work, as it always does: I can't picture the younger generation caring about their special day, but maybe I give them too much credit. Holidays come and go; Columbus Day has passed its sell-by date.

     Once upon a time, American history was a simple story we told to feel good about ourselves. George Washington chopped the cherry tree; Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Problems arrived only to be solved—slaves were hardly mentioned until right before Lincoln freed them.
     The nation was run by white Anglo-Saxon men, and naturally they cast themselves in all the hero roles.
     Eventually, the forgotten supporting cast grew tired of being in the shadows—women got the vote, blacks demanded civil rights, immigrant groups inserted themselves into the American story. That's why Monday is Columbus Day, one of just 10 federal holidays.
     "I'll tell you how it happened," said Dominic Di Frisco, president emeritus of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian Americans. "The Italian immigrants arrived after the German immigrants, after the Irish immigrants. They saw events like the Von Steuben parade and decided they needed a political hero. Christopher Columbus is not much of a figure in Italy. They said, my God, this country is named after him—the District of Columbia, Columbus in Ohio, in Georgia. He was the hero, a symbol of Italian pride, the first immigrant."
     Columbus was on coins and stamps. Chicago held its World's Columbian Exposition.
     So what changed? Why is Columbus now frequently a villain? Well, the same process that put Columbus Day on our calendar—heretofore marginalized people insisting their part in the story be told—kept going, to include Native Americans. They don't feel Columbus discovered anything—the Indians knew they were here all along—and given how quickly the Europeans began murdering, enslaving and pushing aside indigenous peoples here, to them there isn't much to celebrate, which is why there's a card widely posted on Facebook: "Let's celebrate Columbus Day by walking into someone's house and telling them we live there now." A fair synopsis of what happened, minus the genocide.
     And yet perhaps because I learned the 1970s history catechism, where national unity trumps the complaints of each individual group, I feel for the Italians, who just want to be part of the story and celebrate themselves without having to wipe the blood of the slaughtered off their hands every October.
     What bothers me most about the "Let's celebrate . . . " card is the casual declaration of free-floating guilt that we liberals seem to have mastered. What are you saying? You're sorry the nation was founded? At least Native Americans have a reason to say that, though, like everybody else, their narrative is also self-serving—heavy on "Dances with Wolves," light on the hearts-torn-out-atop-pyramids-to-honor-Quetzalcoatl.
     The Aztecs were the most violent state in recorded human history, so it isn't as if, had Columbus never arrived, the American Eden would remain to this day. To post that card is hypocrisy. Europe's still there. Go back if you feel so guilty about living here. I sure don't. My ancestors never killed an Indian or owned a slave. They were selling rags in Poland when all this was going on, and America was the golden door a handful fled through before the most cultured and sophisticated society in Europe put the rest in ovens. That still doesn't prompt me to show up at German Unity Day and wave pictures of Auschwitz. The past is a lousy place to live.
     So I have sympathy for Italians on Columbus Day; though really—Columbus, Balbo, Berlusconi—there is a pattern of clinging to bad choices here.
     "He was one of the great navigators of history, and we've taken that away from him," said DiFrisco, "and reduced him to some kind of bloodthirsty, syphilis-spreading marauder, and that is not the case."
     Not the entire case. We live in a time when heroes are ritualistically tarnished and, frankly, everybody is better off with the more accurate, though less flattering, narrative than with the pretty story. It's easier for me to grasp the current inability of the government to confront our problems when I consider that it was formed on a lie—"All men are created equal"—that skirted the issue of slavery, kicking it down the pike to explode 75 years later. Ignoring our biggest problems is an American tradition since 1776.
     "Columbus Day is an Italian pride holiday," said Di Frisco. "We decry that fewer and fewer schools have it off. Here's a man who planted the flag of Christianity on the shores of the new world and teachers are systemically taking the image of Columbus we all knew and they've turned him into a villain."
     Speaking of the flag of Christianity . . . but space grows short. Happy Columbus Day.

                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Oct. 10, 2011

A little buddy for our friendly, many-friended river

 

     Given the number of times I've been to The Art Institute, or the Museum of Contemporary Art, or the Field Museum, or the Chicago History Museum, or even such obscure institutions as the International Museum of Surgical Science, or National Mexican Museum of Art in Pilsen, it surprises and saddens me to consider the museums in Chicago that I still haven't gotten to, like the DuSable Museum. 
     I crossed one long-missed museum off my list last week in completely serendipitous fashion. I was strolling along the busy River Walk, on my way to an appointment on the Gold Coast, thinking, "For all the things Rahm Emanuel didn't do, he certainly did do this," when I bumped into the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum, a little facility tucked into the southwestern pylon of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, steps down from Wacker Drive.
     I had a little time. I had a little money—the six dollars it takes to get in.
     As longtime readers of this blog know, I'm a fan of bridges—my very first post on EGD was an ode to the bascule drawbridge—and I was happy to quickly explore this tiny, five floor museum. I only had about 20 minutes, but I still learned far more than I have spending hours in larger museum. My favorite bit of information was that the energetic advocacy group, The Friends of the Chicago River, was named after the headline of a 1979 article in Chicago magazine headlined, "Our Friendless River," an inspiration to every writer or editor who ever puzzled over making a headline both sing and fit.  Sometimes these things resonate...
    It was also interesting to learn that our famously polluted Chicago River is no longer poisoned by industrial waste so much as by run-off—weed poison and spilled oil and such washing from our yards and streets and into the river, particularly during storms. A reminder that what you toss in the gutter ends up in our river.
     The views from the big round windows were a novel perspective on Michigan Avenue, though they could use a cleaning. 
     The bridgehouse museum (I'll be damned if I'll utter the colonel's hated name more than I have to, just because Trib money is somewhere behind this) isn't big on artifacts—a few bulky switches, gauges and levers from days gone past. The highlight is the actual mechanism of the working bridge, which you can see go through its paces whenever the bridge rises or falls, a treat I plan to enjoy as soon as I am able. The small museum is big on historical and environmental information, and warrants a revisit to study its riches at leisure.

    

The Saturday Snapshot #9

    Faithful reader Tony Galati sends along this snapshot of two New England salts, along with this explanation:

     I've been transferring some old Kodachrome slides to digital. I just did these from a 1972 trip to Nantucket that I took with a buddy the summer I graduated. The town of Nantucket was filled with really old people, hippies, and other assorted characters. We were somewhat of a minority. What better reason to travel?

   While this pair of gentlemen look as sharp as tacks, they offer an opportunity to plug a marvelous article in this week's New Yorker, "The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care," by Larissa MacFarquhar. The story represents top notch reporting and beautiful writing about a vitally important subject, and I can't recommend it enough. It's almost a philosophical work, focusing on the untruths told to dementia patients to make their lives more endurable, and f you want to make the story even more unsettling than it already is, ask yourself, as I did, what it might suggest about the lies we tell each other and ourselves to get through our days.

Waiting for justice that might never come

Set, "Waiting for Godot"

   

     So now we wait.
     The Senate is expected to vote on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the United States Supreme Court some time over the weekend.
     And the Jason Van Dyke murder trial for the shooting of Laquan McDonald has gone to the jury.
Two events that mesh together, and not just because they are reaching their climax at the same time.
     Both involve the intersection of justice and politics, obviously. Both have been churning social media like a washing machine gone berserk, as partisans argue and evaluate. Like the famous blind men running their hands over an elephant, everybody describes what they perceive before them, never suspecting that the conclusions they reach are based on where they were standing when they began their exploration.
     Waiting is hard. The Kavanaugh hearings went on for only a few days, but transfixed the nation, with Christine Blasey Ford's testimony creating a rippled national shock that for one moment seemed to cut through our national divide into warring camp. Then our division returned, like the metal man in Terminator II, reconstituting itself, the red eye winking to life, raging back in the afternoon with Kavanaugh's angry, deeply partisan rebuttal that demonstrated his unsuitability for the court far more dramatically than the possibility of a 34-year-old drunken attack.
     The Van Dyke trial has been gathering steam for three years, since the release of the video cast a pall over Christmas 2015, and lit the fuse on the implosion of Rahm Emanuel's mayorship. The jury might have delivered its verdict by the time you read this.
     Both situations pivot around figures of authority: Kavanaugh, a right wing judge picked to push extremist positions like overturning Roe v. Wade, constraining voting rights, and unleashing the power of money to control even more than it does. Van Dyke, a cop, holding the power life or death in his hands, literally, working in a city with a national reputation for shootings and unsolved murders.

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Flashback 2000: Near-disaster of biblical proportions

     Facebook isn't the font of fascination it once sorta was. Too many ads. But I glance at it anyway, just to see what's going on, though most of my friends seem to be either expressing outrage—can you BELIEVE what they've done now?—or nostalgia: do you remember caramel bullseyes? (Or a combination of the two, condemning the modern world because kids can't play with Jarts anymore). 
     Others like to put big block memes asking unusual questions. I typically ignore those. But a few days ago I noticed this query on a friend's page, and instantly thought, "Yes! Yes I have!" As outlined in the column below.


     There is no punctuation in the Bible. The Hebrew original, that is. No vowels, either.
     It leads to, umm, flexibility when it comes to interpretation, and scholars have happily frittered away the centuries debating the meaning of this or that particular passage.
     The line that best illustrates this process is from Genesis 22. God, in an antic mood, tells Abraham to go sacrifice his son, Isaac, as a burnt offering. Abraham leads the boy to the mountaintop to do the bloody deed. Isaac, who is no fool, can't help but notice that something is amiss.
     "Behold the fire and the wood," he says. "But where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"
    Abraham answers: "God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son."
    Only that comma, of course, isn't in the original text. So he might have been telling Isaac that his doom is near: "God will provide himself the lamb. For a burnt offering: my son."
      Sure, it's a stretch. But if you spend enough time thinking a certain way, especially when you're young, it makes a lingering impact on your mind, creating a certain perversity of outlook.
     For instance: A current radio ad for an eyeglass store has this tagline: "For people who can't see paying a lot for glasses." The moment I heard it, I smiled, thinking they were slyly communicating that their business overcharges people with bad vision: "For people who can't see, paying a lot for glasses."
     This trait is not always benign. In fact, this week it very nearly cost me hundreds of dollars, not to mention depositing tons of unwanted dirt in the backyard of my new home.
     The previous owners had an above-ground pool. Before I could picture myself lounging by the cool waters, my wife, the lawyer, announced that the pool was a big circular drowning pit, inviting our children and the children in the neighborhood to a watery doom. So out went the pool.
     Leaving behind a hole, 20 feet across and about 6 inches deep. The hole needed to be filled. I saw, at long last, after a quarter-century of neglect, a chance to put all those years of geometry to use. The equation for the area of a circle is branded on my brain: area = π r².

     I'm tempted to go into all the math, but as this is a family newspaper, I'll skip over the complexities and cut to the chase: by multiplying pi and the radius first—perhaps influenced by my youthful biblical bickering—and then squaring them, instead of squaring the radius first, and then multiplying by pi, I managed to get about 900 square feet. A figure three times as large as it should have been.
     Not an abstract, point-off-the-quiz mistake. But a truck-dumping-three-times-as-much-dirt-as-I-need mistake.
     Luckily, I caught it in time, through my natural need to check and recheck things. I realized I was wrong by imagining a square the same size—20 feet across. The area of that, of course, would be easy: 20 x 20, or 400 square feet.
     So how is it, I wondered, stepping back from the brink, that a circle of the same size would have more than twice the area?
     Finally figuring it out, I called the dirt store, which is an experience for a city kid. One phone call, and a big dump truck shows up at your house, the back filled with seven cubic yards of topsoil, which cost $170 and weigh 14,000 pounds.
     The truck dumped it in a pile 4 feet high, in the center of the hole left by the pool.
     And then it began to rain.
     "Better get that dirt spread," the driver said, climbing into his cab. "Because once it gets wet, it turns to muck."
     Which is where we shall leave the author, amateur biblical scholar and math whiz, frantically shoveling this pile of moistening dirt in the driving rain. A humbling experience and, believe it or not, a tonic for a guy who works with his brain all day, and not always successfully at that.
            —Originally published in the Sun-Times, June 22, 2000

We don't want nobody nobody sent. But we do want onion rings on our salad

  

     What's more Chicago than a salad with onion rings?
     I know you're thinking, "Deep dish pizza. " Or "a hot dog with relish and onions and mustard and all that other stuff Chicago dogs are supposed to come with."
     But that's Cliche Chicago, the food stuffs that once represented the city and to some still do. Even an idol of granite is worn away by excessive worship. Every time I hear a radio commercial for a bank trying to pander to the locals by invoking either deep dish pizza or Chicago dogs, those icons seem a little more dubious, inauthentic, corrupted, like scrip issued by an occupying power.
     Maybe you had to be where I am when looking at my salad: The Palace Grill on Madison, opened in 1938, with its chrome and red vinyl, its black and white checkerboard floor, yet true to its name as the residence of royalty. At least a particular kind of Chicago royalty: hockey players and cops, due to the proximity to the United Center, for the former, and for the latter, across the street from the Office of Emergency Management, plus various cop credit unions and training facilities nearby.
     I'm the least coppish, most unhockeylike person imaginable. I've spent far more time eating at The Palace Grill than I have watching hockey games in my entire life. But even I take on a certain swagger ambling into The Palace. Of course, the welcoming presence of George helps a lot—George Lemperis, the owner, whose cousins bought what was then a 19-stool Skid Row diner in 1955.  It was open 24 hours a day, then they started closing at 3 p.m., more for safety than anything else. 

     George and his father Gus bought the place from his cousins in 1979; he marked his 40th year there, the 80th since The Palace opened in 1938. George makes intense, almost feverish eye contact — really, it's like he's about to punch you in the face — then offer a firm handshake as if we were sealing a real estate transaction.

     "I'm meeting so-and-so's guy," I drawl, naming a Chicago politician.

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